Should theatre seats be reserved for tweeting? Plus, why the people of Antarctica give art a warm welcome

Chris the sled dog listens to a gramophone in the Ross Dependency of Antarctica, during Captain Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic, 1911. Photograph: Herbert Ponting/Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge/Getty Images

This week, Noises Off is shouting "Macbeth!", whistling, spitting, turning around twice and sleeping with a script under its pillow. Theatre blogs and podcasts have turned their attention to myths in need of busting.

First, have a listen to What's On Stage's podcast of Monday's panel discussion on the Future of the West End, which defies myth number one – the false dichotomy that sees the West End as inherently good or bad. The discussion accepts the sector on its own terms without pandering to it. As our very own Lyn Gardner says, the West End "has always been in crisis and it has always been in rude health".

Later, playwright Richard Bean and Society of London Theatre (SOLT) chief executive Julian Bird set about shattering the accepted truth that West End ticket prices are extortionate: Bean points the finger at legal ticket touts selling tickets at inflated prices. Bradley, meanwhile, points out that no teenager ever scoffed at paying £75 for a JLS concert, so if you give people what they want, they're happy to pay. (If you've not got time to listen, Lyn Gardner writes about the discussion from her perspective here on the blog LINK TO COME, while Catherine Love offers a good summary at The Public Reviews.)

That's echoed by American blogger Curt Hopkins, who smashes another myth – the idea that social media is the way forward. In a rant against tweet seats – the idea of roping off special seating where audience members who want to can tweet or text undisturbed, which he brands an "operatically stupid idea" – he argues that "if kids don't have a sense of ownership and theatre doesn't produce a sense of wonder for them, they won't come … And Twitter won't help."

At the Writers' Guild website back in Britain, playwright Arnold Wesker questions – well, attempts to obliterate – the very idea of a writers' theatre. He believes the term refers not simply to new writing in general, but to "new writing by new writers". Wesker is a great playwright, but his argument surely smacks of bitterness: "On what basis could the Royal Court claim to be a writer's theatre when they kept rejecting the work of one of its most acclaimed writers?" The clue, I'd suggest, is in that rogue Freudian apostrophe: the Court, and any new-writing venue, exists to support more than one writer.

Mind you, if Wesker feels exiled, perhaps he should spare a thought for Mat Smart, a playwright living at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. In a beautiful post for HowlRound, Smart asks whether theatre and art have any value in the harsh conditions there. "At McMurdo," he writes, "everyone must perform a necessary logistical task to keep the town running and the inhabitants alive. We don't need to see a performance at 8pm. We need to eat … More than anywhere I've ever lived, it's easy to see why no one is paid to be an artist." Even so, happily, art flourishes; it's a myth that humans don't need to be creative. Without art, he says, "a sizable percentage of the population would lose their minds".